A mathematician and scientist in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago helps readers explore the concept of infinity through unique concepts including chessboards, a chicken-sandwich sandwich and the creation of infinite cookies from an infinite dough ball.

X and Y are desperate to bake infinite pie! With the help of quirky and uber-smart Aunt Z, X and Y will use math concepts to bake their way to success!

In How to Bake Pi, math professor Eugenia Cheng provides an accessible introduction to the logic and beauty of mathematics, powered, unexpectedly, by insights from the kitchen: we learn, for example, how the béchamel in a lasagna can be a lot like the number 5, and why making a good custard proves that math is easy but life is hard.

Where does math come from? From a textbook? From rules? From deduction? From logic? Not really, Eugenia Cheng writes in Is Math Real?: it comes from curiosity, from instinctive human curiosity, "from people not being satisfied with answers and always wanting to understand more." And most importantly, she says, "it comes from questions": not from answering them, but from posing them. Nothing could seem more at odds from the way most of us were taught math: a rigid and autocratic model (...) which taught us to follow specific steps to reach specific answers. Instead of encouraging a child who asks why 1+1 is 2, our methods of education force them to accept it. Instead of exploring why we multiply before we add, a textbook says, just to get on with the order of operations. Indeed, the point is usually just about getting the right answer, and those that are good at that, become "good at math" while those who question, are not. And that's terrible: These very same questions, as Cheng shows, aren't simply annoying questions coming from people who just don't "get it" and so can't do math. Rather, they are what drives mathematical research and push the boundaries in our understanding of all things. Legitimizing those questions, she invites everyone in, whether they think they are good at math or not. And by highlighting the development of mathematics outside Europe, Cheng shows that-western chauvinism notwithstanding--that math can be for anyone who wishes to do it, and how much we gain when anyone can. (shrink)